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---------------------------- I Bleed for This? ------------------------------
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The Abolition of Work
appreciated by IBFT
by Bob Black
P.O. Box 2159, Albany NY 12220.
No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any
evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world
designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop
working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating
a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution.
By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality,
commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's
play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in
generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't
passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and
slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation,
but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us
want to act.
The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much
the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from
the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival.
Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative
because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most
brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because
they believe in so little else.
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should
end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following
Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to
be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists --
except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists
agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But
if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only
because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely
reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours,
working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll
gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to
do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for
all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they
quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to
sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they
haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by
bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen.
Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses
are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences
over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of
them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep
us working.
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious.
To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous,
although frivolity isn't triviality; very often we ought to take
frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with
high stakes. I want to play for keeps.
The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be
quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never
more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes.
Nor am I promoting the managed, time-disciplined safety-valve called
"leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work.
Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but
hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from
vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they
can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at
work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.
I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to
abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by
defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of
work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements
are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political
means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by
other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its
own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the
worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what
work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is
usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of
domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In
advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies
whether capitalist or "communist," work invariably acquires other
attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually -- and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist
countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is
an employee -- work is employment, i.e. wage-labor, which means
selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who
work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR of Cuba or
Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be
adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled
Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey --
temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who
perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last
several millennia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or
rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone.
Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and
office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which
ensures servility.
But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they
have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an
or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest
(as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory
exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the
energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of
it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week
with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who
contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing
tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it.
This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of
sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting
and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational/technical
criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real
world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and
profit to the exigencies of organizational control.
The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of
assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline."
Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough.
Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the
workplace -- surveillance, rote-work, imposed work tempos, production
quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and
the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the
mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible.
It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero
and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions,
they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as
thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively
diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which
must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.
Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary.
What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is
axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of
consequences." This is unacceptable if it implies that play is
inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences.
This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any,
are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the
behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the
play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The
player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the
core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is).
Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo
Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect
Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There
are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are
rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing.
Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices aren't
rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can
be played with at least as readily as anything else.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have
rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free
like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders
or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under
regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller
details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are
answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent
and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the
authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern
workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament
totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in
any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the
ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and
discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a
monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and
factories came in at about the same time, and their operators
consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is
a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and
what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how
fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes,
regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you
go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any
reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors,
he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called
"insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not
only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment
compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is
noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same
treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What
does this say about their parents and teachers who work?
The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the
waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for
decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not
too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better
still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and
office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or
stupid.
You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work,
chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a
much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us
than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and
education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work
from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the
nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and
psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied
that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded
phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the
families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than
one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain
the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy
and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to
us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other
cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present
position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would
have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when
he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged
today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and
appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to
draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The
ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed (the
Calvinist cranks notwithstanding) until overthrown by industrialism --
but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.
Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into
stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible
psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on
the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as
boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even
then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic
aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said
that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they
have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and
citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we
keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called
free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is
mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning
from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the
peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports
itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes
primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and
steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. No wonder
Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is
for saps!"
Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with
him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a
citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work
as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their
culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever
gives his labor for money sells himself and puts him- self in the rank
of slaves." His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive
societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen
who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West
Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and
accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to
regain the lost power and health." Our ancestors, even as late as the
eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present
predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the
underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St.
Monday" -- thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years
before its legal consecration -- was the despair of the earliest
factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of
the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for
a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to
obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs.
Even the exploited peasants of the ancien regime wrested substantial
time back from their landlords' work. According to Lafargue, a fourth
of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays,
and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a
progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants'
days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously
far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would
wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.
To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the
earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when
we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then
nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate
unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh
Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was
unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that
was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority
over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of
Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already
encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways
of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were
too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower
orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better
and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century,
English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war,
refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to
white settlements than West Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the
west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley
version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in
Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist
Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution.
(Kropotkin was a scientist who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for
fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking
about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and
his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on
contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an
article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less
than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard
as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than
we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is
intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep
in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of
society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they
were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled
labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities;
unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible
except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's
definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his
complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold
nature, thinking and feeling. Play and freedom are, as regards
production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good
intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of
freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under
the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He
never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as
what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all,
to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.
The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is
evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial
Europe, among them M. Dorothy George's England in Transition and Peter
Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is
Daniel Bell's essay "Work and Its Discontents," the first text, I
believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many words and,
had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency
ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The
End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that
Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social unrest
but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and
uninformed by ideology.
As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations , for all his
enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to
(and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the
Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith
observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are
necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life
is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to
exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant
as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few
blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden
Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction,
identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and
since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one
identified in HEW's report Work in America, the one which cannot be
exploited and so is ignored. It does not figure in any text by any
laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard
Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek,
"it does not compute."
If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade
humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others
which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to
borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide.
Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read
these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in
this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to 25
million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very
conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury.
Thus they don't count the half-million cases of occupational disease
every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases
which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface.
The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000
miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year. What
the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have
their lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means,
after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their
late 50's. Consider all the other workaholics.
Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very
well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work,
or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the
automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or
else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count
must be added the victims of auto- industrial pollution and
work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart
disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or
indirectly, to work.
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think
the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any
different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred,
of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at
least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our
forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not
martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work. But
work is nothing to die for.
State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything,
more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here.
Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the
Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear
disasters which make Times Beach and Three Mile Island look like
elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation,
currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a
health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in
the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.
Historians like Eugene Genovese have argues persuasively that -- as
antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the
North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern
plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats
seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious
enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory
by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The
enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don't even try to
crack down on most malefactors.
What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are
fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism,
turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall
goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious
and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent
feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread
among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and
necessary.
I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar
as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free
activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions,
quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative
side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done.
AT present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid
of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter
and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful
work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and
craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes
except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that
wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial
barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become
recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then
most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing
fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense
and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal
appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that
just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the
figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs
for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but
the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work
serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right
off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers,
managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers,
landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them.
There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you
liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.
Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom
have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire
industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance,
consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that
the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the
"secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector"
(agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to
those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively
useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public
order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home
just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to
make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise
why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes
in the last fifty years?
Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war
production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant --
and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional
Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism
on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of
the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the
energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble
social problems.
Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the
one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most
tedious tasks. I refer to housewives doing housework and
child-rearing. By abolishing wage- labor and achieving full
unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear
family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of
labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been
for the last century or two, it is economically rational for the man
to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide
him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be
marched off to youth concentration camps called "schools," primarily
to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under control, and
incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so
necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of
the nuclear family whose unpaid "shadow work," as Ivan Illich says,
makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with
this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing
of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time
workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students.
They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they're
better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not
identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only
play can bridge the generation gap.
I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on
the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the
scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war
research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising
means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like
mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves
with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media
communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am
no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a push button paradise. I
don't want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself.
There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest
place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging.
When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture
and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination
diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated
what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent
observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that
all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's
labor. The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin,
B.F. Skinner -- have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which
is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the
promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if
they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any
particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human
purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing.
What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to
discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities
that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced
to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do
to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil
painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home
every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of
permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante
which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs,
just things to do and people to do them.
The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated,
is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is
that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it
possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be
enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which
afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for
instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don't
want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedants
for tenure.
Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to
time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might
enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of
kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile
profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for
them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too
long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free
play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of
activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking
when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when
they're just fuelling up human bodies for work.
Third, other things being equal, some things that are unsatisfying if
done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an
overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances
are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work.
People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the
least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to
some people don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at least
potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As
the saying goes, "anything once." Fourier was the master at
speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to
use in post- civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the
Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could
have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse.
Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be
organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage,
with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these
precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes
perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary
transformation. Bear in mind that we don't have to take today's work
just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of
whom would have to be perverse indeed.
If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out
of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some
extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris
considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution.
Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a
specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its
qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which
they were stolen by work. It's a sobering thought that the Grecian
urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their
own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare
as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that theres' no
such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything, it's just
the opposite. We shouldn't hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has
to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.
The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.
There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people
suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris -- and even a hint, here and
there, in Marx -- there are the writings of Kropotkin, the
syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and
new (Bookchin). The Goodman brother's Communitas is exemplary for
illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and
there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of
alternative/ appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like
Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog
machines. The situationists -- as represented by Vaneigem's Revolution
of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International Anthology --
are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did
quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers' councils with
the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any
extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last
champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no
workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?
So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what
would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work.
Anything can happen. The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs.
necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically
once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption
of delightful play-activity.
Life will become a game,or rather many games, but not -- as it is now
-- a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of
productive play. The participants potentiate each other's pleasures,
nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more
you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the
better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the
libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and
desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get
more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.
Workers of the world... RELAX!
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